Databoom Hackathon – Data is never enough

Hungary’s first Open Data Hackhaton took place last week Friday titled Databoom, hosted by K-Monitor, the Magyary Zoltán Public E-Administration Sciences Association and the Kitchen Budapest. Our team also represented itself and Debrecen with 18 open datasets.

The objective of the 24 hours long development competition was that with the 3 sections: the use of local spatial data, transparent local budget, and local public data, form teams with contestants of different competences and skills to basically create something, and on the next day, through a sleepless night, present this creation to the judges. The teams were made up by public administration experts, programmers and analyzers and they could work with the following data types:

Unstructured spatial data, big data, Károly Róbert University College

Structure spatial data, Open Street Map

European air quality database

The budget of Pesterzsébet 2015

The budget of Zugló 2015

The projected budget of the city of Wesel 2016

The budget of Bilbao 2015

The data of empty real estates of the capitol city’s local government.

Smart district IX.

The economic and social data of the countryside local governments (Debrecen and Hajdúszoboszló)

The database of empty real estates of the capitol city’s local government garnered the most interest. Three teams started working on an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) based on this data.The data of Debrecen was chosen by one team, which turned out to be a data mining group. After some time they decided not to spend the night with the data made public by them. According to this team they could have come out with really exciting numbers and projections by using more intricate and detailed data tables. The lesson has been learned: there is no such thing as enough data.

The teams were working on multiple quite interesting projects through the one day event: a dog map was made, as well as an open data ranking list of Hungary’s cities using openstreetmap data. (Debrecen was ranked the 10th with the present amount of 954 data)

Databoom Hackathon

Several teams made visualizations for local governments’ budgets and improved the otherwise already functioning open data based administration map which enables the locals and the local government to be kept updated on the administration of Alsóneméd.

Drop Da Bass

The competition was won by the “Drop da Bass” team, who made a complex and intricate application which categorizes and shows the empty real estates of the capital on a map, and also gives the opportunity for those living in the area to voice their needs on an interface, thus encouraging entrepreneurs to start a venture in the area utilizing one of the unused real estates. For example if the locals would want to have a pizzeria and an entrepreneur would want to establish one, the application would point out the places where the venture should be established. Even a loan calculator interface was implemented in the application. Their prize, which was provided by the embassy of the Netherlands, was a trip to Amsterdam to another Hackathon.